Carmelo Anthony gets mentioned as one of the game’s elite scorers. As he should. Few players can average 25 points a season consistently. Few players in the league can fill it up — from anywhere on the court, creating their own shot — like Anthony. He doesn’t do it terribly efficiently (his shooting percentage is about the league average), but he puts up the numbers. He is an elite scorer.

But elite leader? Guy who makes his team better? Guy who can lead his team to a title?

No. Not yet anyway. Carmelo Anthony is not considered in the same strata with Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, Dwyane Wade and even LeBron James (who has taken a team with questionable talent around him to the finals).

If Anthony wants to be in that group, he’ll have to prove it in New York. By winning. And not just 60 regular season games, but by winning when it matters in the playoffs. By leading a team that in a couple years can beat the Heat and Bulls. By leading a true title contender.

What happens with the Knicks in the next three years will be how we remember Anthony after his career. Will it be as an elite scorer, or as a winner?

Anthony has always put up a fight in New York — remember the Dec.16, 2006 fight where he (and the other 9 players on the floor at the time) but tossed for a brawl? Even the crowd was fighting that night. He’s going to need that kind of fight now, much of it to push and pull his teammates up to contender status.

Some things are beyond Anthony’s control. The roster around him and Amar’e Stoudemire is not ready to contend — the Knicks just shipped out their best role players to get Anthony. They are going to need a center who can defend the paint. They need depth everywhere. They need a point guard who can run Mike D’Antoni’s system (Chauncey Billups at age 34 is a more efficient point guard than Raymond Felton was, but how a guy who thrives walking the ball up into halfcourt sets does with the Knicks system remains to be seen).

A lot of what will be around him — and the ability to bring in Chris Paul or Deron Williams to really run the show — will be decided in the next Collective Bargaining Agreement. Nobody knows what that is going to look like. It could be so restrictive as to make it hard to put much of a team together. While that will be true of the Knicks it will be true of other teams as well. The Knicks problem is that the Heat and Bulls (and Celtics for this season and next) got a jump on it and have more complete rosters already. The Knicks will be playing catch up under different rules.

This season, the Knicks may (if they get lucky) climb all the way up to the fifth seed (they are 5.5 games behind the Hawks, but Atlanta has one of the toughest schedules in the league the rest of the way).

But next season, and for a couple seasons after that, the expectations for the Knicks will be ridiculous. Fans will expect a contender, whether or not it is warranted.

It’s going to fall to Carmelo Anthony (and Amar’e Stoudemire) to lead them there. To push them and, if necessary, drag them there. That is what elite players do — they make teams better than just the sum of their parts. They lead, by example and in the locker room. They make their teams contenders by play and by force of will.

If Anthony wants that to be his legacy, he will have to prove it in New York. On the league’s biggest stage.

The NBA, like the NFL, is first and foremost a business seeking profit. When confronted with social issues, from Donald Sterling to “I can’t breathe” shirts, the NBA has always kept an eye on its wallet.

With the threat of anthem protests looming, the NBA proactively met with players to head off any kneeling. That was business strategy, nothing grander.

The NFL is just trying to get to the same point with a similar policy.

But the NFL already alienated its players through the heavy-handed implementation of this policy and years of other issues. The NBA has established greater trust from its players, both by finessing them in talks about societal issues and actually standing behind them, like the Bucks did with Sterling Brown.

There are plenty of opportunities to criticize the NFL relative to the NBA. The leagues’ national-anthem policies are not a good one.

And spare me the idea that leaders trying to divide us from on high is What’s Wrong With Our Country. Centuries of racism have already divided us.

Some leaders, like Donald Trump, exploit those divisions. Other leaders talk fancifully of unity without actually reconciling what caused the divisions.

The 76ers center made just the All-NBA second team, landing behind the Pelicans’ Anthony Davis. Davis surged after Cousins went down, earning overall credit from All-NBA voters, who were also increasingly likely to view him as a center rather than just a forward.

As a result, Davis made the All-NBA first team at center – costing Embiid about $29 million over the next five years.

Embiid’s contract extension, which kicks in next season, calls for his starting salary to be 25% of the salary cap (the typical max for a player with his experience level). If he made the All-NBA first team, his starting salary would have been 30% of the salary cap .

Though the exact cap won’t be determined until July, here’s what Embiid is projected to earn on his standard max and what he could’ve earned on the super max (with 8% raises in both cases):

Obviously Embiid will still earn a lot of money, and he and Philadelphia have a bright future.

But it’s hard not to think, if Cousins didn’t get hurt, Embiid would be even richer.

HOUSTON (AP)– The Houston Rockets will wear patches on their jerseys to honor the victims of the school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, on Thursday night in Game 5 of the Western Conference Finals against the Golden State Warriors.

The patches will read: “Santa Fe HS.” It’s one of several tributes the team plans following Friday’s shooting. Eight students and two teachers died at the school, located 30 miles from downtown Houston.

The school’s high school choir will perform the national anthem. There will be a moment of silence and a video tribute before tipoff.

Santa Fe’s senior class and administrators have been invited to attend the game as guests of owner Tilman Fertitta. The Rockets also will honor first responders on the court.